Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Bettina Lerner
Committee Members
Peter Hitchcock
Sonali Perera
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature
Keywords
Contemporary Novel, Migration, Genre, Affect
Abstract
Forms of Encounter argues that contemporary migration must be apprehended through and as genre: a historically specific set of narrative conventions that predetermine how the material situation of displacement is understood, evaluated, and acted upon. When displacement is understood as a genre, migration and its proliferating narratives can be seen together as a horizon of intelligibility that governs the many imaginings of a defining situation of our world and time. Perpetually framed as a scene of encounter, these manifold chronicles of migration consolidate a mode of thinking and relating to the figure of the migrant and the conditions of displacement. In order to inquire into how migration has become genre, this project examines the contemporary novel as a generative site of investigation into this grammar of sense-making.
What is the story being written about the ever-widening scales of displacement and the figure of the migrant? How does migration come to constitute a certain patterned 'commonsense' that subtends the many disagreements of knowledge and action that emerge from it? And what does its grammar suggest for an understanding of the variegated forms of life rendered possible (or impossible) given the orderings of our contemporary moment?
To explore these questions, I turn to three contemporary novels that stage this very scene of encounter: Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), and Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019). Through these case studies, I offer a consideration of how literary fiction of migration negotiates with, and is shaped by, these generic conventions. Each novel's distinctive formal engagement, accompanied by its affective saturation, reveals constitutive features of this genre. Among them are an idiom of countability, which mediates between the quantifying logic that renders statistical aggregates and the narrative accounting that seeks to empathically individualize; an attempted translation of iconography that seeks to defamiliarize; and an exposure of the infra-political predicament, a structural contradiction and form of representational management by which the migrant novel’s humanization of migrant figures simultaneously depoliticizes them, rendering them objects of sentimentalized humanitarian care rather than subjects of collective political action. These novels, then, do not simply present migration but participate in constituting the genre's logic that—arguably antedating the reality they claim to document—both enables and forecloses specific forms of thought, action, and feeling.
Recommended Citation
Liebembuk, Jonathan, "Forms of Encounter: The Genre of Displacement in the Contemporary Novel of Migration" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6697
